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The latest news coming from the social media giant has revealed that the company is to be floated on the stock market, seeking to raise $5bn (£3.16bn).

At just eight years old, Facebook has been hugely successful and many financiers have waited on tenterhooks for this opportunity to have a snoop at its books. With phenomenal growth, profits of the company quadrupled to $1bn in 2011 with over 845 million users registered worldwide.

What’s interesting to see are the comments from the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg. In a letter released to the media, Zuckerberg states: “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected.

“We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do.”

A nice quote and cute mission statement, but is it realistic to ask this? Surely those looking to invest serious cash will be big players in the investment sector holding little regard as to what the company’s aim is, but more so for how much money it’s likely to make them.

Many are sceptical of Facebook’s decisions to float, the so-called ‘dot com bubble’ still comes under heavy scrutiny and you only have to look at other networking sites such as MySpace and Friends Reunited to see that this success may not last forever.

One thing that could potentially affect Facebook’s popularity is its decision to make the ‘timeline’ feature compulsory for all its users. With only a few days left for people to delete all the moments of their past they thought were buried deep in their Facebook history, it’s going to be interesting to see what impact the change will have.

One thing’s for sure, if the stock market launch goes ahead at the rumoured price then Zuckerberg’s share would be worth around $24bn, making him the 14th richest person in the world…